Poindexter v. Louisiana Financial Assistance Commission

WISDOM, Circuit Judge:

The free lunches and textbooks Louisiana provides all children in public and private schools are the fruits of a benevolent racially neutral policy. But Louisiana’s tuition grants to children attending private schools are the product of the State’s traditional racial policy of providing segregated schools for white children. Act 99 of 1967, now before us, followed Act 147 of 1962, which replaced Act 3 of the Second Extraordinary Session of 1960, which in turn replaced Act 258 of 1958, the legislature’s first, and unsubtle, system of grants-in-aid 1 . In each, succeeding…